Corrections_Today_January_February_2020_Vol.82_No.1

Communications & Publications

nursing homes. David Guise, of North Carolina, proposed the repurposing of traditional prisons to short-term, treatment intense; beds for those who were traditionally sent to prison for technical violations. We have a desperate need for substance-use treatment in this country. More than 70% of those entering prison have substance-use issues with less than 20%, by the most optimistic statistics, receiving any sort of meaningful treatment, a huge delta and reason for alternative use exists. Of course, this will take political will and resources. As prisons and jails have become the new asylums, another option for the use of unneeded prison space exists: the development of community mental health facilities. Again, this will take a lot of resources and political will, but it certainly could address many of the economic dynamics of closing prison beds. The authors had a unique opportunity to discuss these alternatives, not because they would be adopted, but to give discussion as to why prisons in their current configuration fail. And if you come to the conclusion that prisons are for the most violent, where intervention is, at best, difficult, should we say prisons fail, or should we say we need to find methods to assist those who are the most violent while protecting the public and keeping staff safe? The authors speak of the burn-out factor experienced by correctional officers and cites the 30% vacancy rate experienced by Nebraska.

This is an issue facing most every correctional institution in the country. We take high school graduates, who have limited training in the behavioral sciences and then provide them little training on how to communicate meaningfully with violent personality types. We do not give them many tools of resilience to deal with these people. We do not teach supervisors how to guide or train them on how to deal with the violent adult in custody, except for a use of force. While I may be proven wrong, it is my opinion we will be dealing much more with a core of very violent offenders than we have in the past. The closing chapter discusses how to fix the problem. I may have been the one with too many expectations, but the chapter speaks of issues many of those in the profession have been working on for years. We know that residential drug treatment, meaningful vocational education and the development of a work ethic reduces recidivism, but while we know these programs work, we continue to struggle to make them work. We have very few public-private partnerships to link education in prison to work in the community. Are there tools or programs where they work? And there are successes to build upon? At the time of this writing (October 2019), in North Carolina, a bill was passed which requires those who impose licensure requirements on those released from prisons to routinely review them to ensure there remains a nexus to public

safety. Stating a problem and fixing a problem are vastly different. For example, the chapter does a good job in explaining the need for treatment courts, but little time is spent on the issue of how to overcome the political reality of implementing them. What is needed in most scenarios is not a statement of the problem, but a set of implementation suggestions on how to work on ameliorating the issues. In my 45 years of working in corrections, I have found, a few times, an absent legislative fiat that a problem is solved (and often not then), but I have found incremental suggestions to work on the issues most valuable. Having some suggested implementation tools would be most helpful to those who continue to work in the profession. A reality is they are most likely trying to survive day to day, and do not have time to develop strategies. This is where a book like “Why American Prisons Fail and How to Fix Them” has great promise, which I do not believed was realized. Is the book worth reading? Yes. Besides my personal bias regarding the co-author saying that the Bureau of Prisons discarded unused equipment to get more money, I found the book full of good information. But that is where it stopped. My expectations when picking up the book was that it would provide not only the information, but ways to get to some of the solutions of solving the problems presented but I found little of that. u

58 — January/February 2020 Corrections Today